But I’m afraid that you’ll get no help from the publishers. They already are backed into a corner with Amazon. They could demand that Amazon drop the DRM aspect all they want and Amazon will just snicker. You’ll have to convince Amazon that it’s in their best interests to do it, and there will have to be options for the publishers to sell electronic rights or copies elsewhere that can compete with Amazon and force Amazon to change. The free market has to actually have a market — we don’t yet.

This, the day after Amazon buys Lexcycle. When more and more people flock to Amazon, and, though they criticize, they BUY the Kindle. And then there are the thousands of other readers who actually like being able to download PDFs onto their readers.

The point is, I don’t know whether publishers WILL get behind it if their own authors, VERY BIG AUTHORS (ahem, Rowling), refuse to have their lovingly-penned-and-forever-and-ever-lasting-in-the-beautiful-smelling-ink-and-parchment books put into ebook format, because, well, REAL PEOPLE don’t read books electronically anyway. And only the true literarians deserve to read their books in the format originally bestowed upon them, thankyouverymuch.

This is exactly the kind of thing that is stunting ebook growth, as has been mentioned more than once on this blog.

Of course it’s time for publishers to step up to the plate and be leaders in the future of reading. That should have been their job in the first place. But they won’t, and that’s the really sad part.